Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

Prior to the January 2007 announcement of the impending iPhone, I was already a minor shareholder of Apple for their fine set of products. Ironically, I had not yet owned an Apple product beside a mere iPod nano obtained through a holiday party raffle. I invested a small amount simply on the news they had decided on switching over to Intel CPU’s for their entire product line.

The reason was not simply because Intel carries more weight in the industry or because Apple computers are to benefit from the higher processing power of the de facto leader in semi’s, but simply because an Apple computer has now become “doubly” valuable when compared to mere PC. With an Apple computer, I can not only run Apple’s OS and all their slick consumer geared applications, but I can also quickly boot over to a full native Windows OS with a simple key press when turning it on. Initially Apple lacked direct support for such a boot feature and most of the press focused on the ability to virtualize Windows within Mac OS. Parallels and VMWare Fusion, the two main competing mac virtualization softwares, effortlessly ran to the spotlight as the way to run Windows within a Mac. Ultimately Apple caught headwind of this frenzy and no more than few months, Mac had native dual boot feature for anyone wanting to run Windows and Mac as a choice with a single button click at boot time.

In short, a Mac, all of a sudden, presented a very valuable proposition for any serious Windows user in the market for a new computer.

A year or so later, the iPhone is announced. My gosh, is this thing for real I remember asking myself. The stock price that day was roughly in the 80’s if I recall correctly and had jumped about 8% following the announcement. While I’m not an investor on day to day news, I am however a long term investor and any news having a definitive impact on longterm will always surely fork me to action. I was sold from the moment jobs scrolled the music list with his finger in public for the first time — and I wasn’t the only one.

Video Jobs Demoing iPhone for first time in public:

So I decided to up the ante a bit for the longterm, Apple had an Ace card.

As the woo’s and wow’s resonated in blogospheres and hallways of corporate and consumer america in a relentless fashion never seen before, I was certain my ante was safe for the long term. The impact was clearly evident in multiple sectors, music, phone, entertainment — even to the distaste of some non-believing computer sector titans.

Balmer laughs as first comment to iPhone:

Launch day, June 29, 2007. Having performed my share of voluntarily marketing for the weeks and months leading up to release, my coworkers knew I would be one of those unfortuanate souls waiting in line for their purchasing opportunity.

The last time I saw lines forming with this voracity was Microsoft’s release of Windows 95. At that time, I was too young to understand and apply Peter Lynch’s investment style — invest in what you know and are certain of, however had I, I would have reaped the benefits as Microsoft dominated the desktop and business software category the following 5 to 10 — year over year. That missed opportunity only served as a reminder and a lesson learned for any future opportunity — and this may be it.

This frenzy served only to convince me I am not alone, and this is a domestic occurrence for product already planed and destined for international release. The ante must be increased — the long term odds are too good to be true.

For the weeks and months that followed, I decided to stalk the Apple stores around south Florida. Initially I was simply a member of the of the frenzied group interested in all things Apple. I was going at my leisure when time permitted, however in short order I realized the frenzy, post iPhone launch, simply continued. You couldn’t walk through an Apple store without saying “excuse me” at least a half a dozen times if not more just to navigate the main corridors. I immediately questioned, is this frenzy having a halo effect on Apple and it’s entire product line?

Coincidentally the iPhone launch was on the last two days of Apple’s fiscal quarter so the full effect, particularly the halo effect, should be recognized and felt on their next quarterly announcement.

Touring the Apple stores became an interesting game of quasi-interrogation with various Apple staff and geniuses from store to store. Questions were phrased with basic customer interest as an allegory to a relentless statistical business analyst. Throughout the fiscal quarter, I visited each south Florida store at least twice — shaving the last bit of doubt for an all-in wager as I was witnessing the perfect hand forming.

Interestingly enough, while working at Inktel Direct, the President, Ricky Arriola, happend to give a presentation on leadership as a kick of to a series of successful internal training seminares termed “Idea” (Inktel Direct Excellence Academy) a few days prior to Apple’s quarterly announcement. Already motivated by the various topics presented, a topic which resonated was making a decision — leaders don’t teeter on a topic longer than necessary and more often than not make a decision and take direction. This inspiration from the presentation and the highlight of that one particular topic combined with Apple quarterly announcement imminent and the bag full of statistical measures all pointing to a royal flush, the “all in” call was a no brainer at 3:50PM before markets closed prior to Apple’s after market quarterly announcement. Chip gathering followed at 9:40AM shortly after markets open the following day. Ironically, I must emphasize I truly don’t condone or recommend any type of short term trading of this fashion as the only sure fire way to win in markets is Buffet & Lynch’s style with long term solid positions.

Apple was on the rise. All throughout 2008 reaching a peak of about $200/share at end of 2007 prior to the general collapse of the markets. As the markets collapsed, Apple, as much any company in any sector, suffered as the exodus of investors seeking a safe haven in treasuries, bonds, and other low risk fixed income investments.

The rumor mill for a new iPhone becomes rampant, an iPhone which connects to the faster 3G network. The blogosphere lights up again, this time with spy fotos from China factories confirming the imminent release. For a recession, Apple seems to be capturing all the spare attention and dollars at the expense of all other non-essential items.

iPhone 3G launch day, lines abound even further. Here is a video I recorded while arriving at Aventura mall in Florida. In a recession, lines like these convinced me to play more long term rounds in the Apple game.

iPhone 3G launch in Aventura Mall, July 7 2008

Store congestion not only continues, but actually increases as it’s difficult to even walk through a store during the 2008 holiday season. Can this long term game ever have any signs of ending? During this time, the financial crisis is in full swing. Henry Paulson and Bernanke are feverishly trying to get emergency liquidity approved and injected into the economy through the treasury as Bernanke had virtually exhausted all his options from a federal reserve perspective. It was literally chaos in D.C. and economically as a whole. Ironically, while financial armageddon was occurring domestically with trickling effects internationally, Apple stores were flush full with holiday shoppers. I’m I seeing an oxymoran here or what?

Despite Apple shares suffering along side all companies, I decided to apply Lynch’s & Buffet’s philosophy along with the typical dollar cost averaging during the continued down turn. The company long term is solid, it’s fundamentals are solid, it’s sitting on tons of cash with no debt and customers abound. Lets start the wagers. I don’t have the full house assured in my hand, however I’m certain the turn or the river will complete my flush long term. With each down turn of $10 in share price, the ante was matched. It was painstakingly difficult to continue this pace from $190/share through to $80/share — but images of Buffet preaching fundamentals soothed my anxiety and gave me confidence with each submission.

By the time $80/share came around I was too heavy in Apple. Apple far outweighed my portfolio 10:1 if not 20:1 — I needed to diversify, and no better time to do so than on the down low. A weekend long research, steadfastly applying Buffet’s value approach and some stats filtering tools putting me neck deep into P/E, debt, revenue qtr to qtr, stochastics and bollingers for hours on end, I arrived at a solid list of fundamental stocks by Sunday evening. Ricky’s presentation echoed in my mind again — a decision needs to be made — should I throw new capital at the fire or simply reduce some Apple at a loss. Buffet kept me from selling at a loss just for capital reasons — fundamentally, Apple is too good and I barely gave it the time necessary to fulfill it’s long term destiny. Done. Timing on late February 2009, the theoretical bottom of this recession, was purely coincidental and the long term bandwagon officially commenced.

Quarter after Quarter, the sound of Apple increasing it’s market share in the computer space resonated and brought a subtle smirk. iPhone exceeding sale expectations, 3GS with video launches in mid summer brining demand so high problems with fulfilment and inventory plague Apple for weeks. World wide launches continue in other countries where even my cousin in Uruguay is now aware of a company called Apple and their infamous iPhone. Apple erecting stores world wide at a pace faster than people fill their gas tanks. Wall street journal classifies Apple’s brand within spitting distance of titans like Coca-Cola, Google, & Microsoft and first in regional ares such as Asia.

The explosive growth is so horrendous, for lack of a better word, Microsoft had to rethink their strategy from a full business perspective. Ads now target Apple directly, something lacking from Microsoft now for over a two decades. Their mobile phone strategy had to take a full about face and consider touch screens and hardware innovations as key priorities. To get closer to the consumer, Microsoft saw the need to open resembling retail outlets — the first opening less than a month ago on Oct 23.

To bring finality on this growth segment, while Apple has a steadily increasing market share for computers sales currently at 8-9%, setting aside all the low end laptops and desktops sold and only considering computers in the $1k range and up, apple commands a 91% market share, up roughly 40% from their 66% the year earlier.

In overall conclusion, although Apple is currently a large cap with slow stymied growth, the numbers are extremely good and investor appreciation, be it stock or dividends, are sure to materialize more long term. It’s additionally rumored, Apple will be changing the accounting rules on iPhone sales. Instead of spreading the sale over two years, as a subsidized product by AT&T, Apple may soon start accounting for the full value upfront. If this occurs, Apple earnings report would have a redbull injection to boot.

P.S. Oh, I forgot to mention Apple is now the #1 music distributor, leapfrogging Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart in roughly two to three years of massive iPod expansion and sheer dominance in portable music devices.

Continuing with the inertia of all things digital movement, we are now approaching the official transition of electronic books into the mainstream. Yes, we have had ebooks and ebook readers, but there were always obstructions preventing them from reaching critical mass.

Digital rights & copyright surely have their fair share objections, however technology has also been an inhibitor. Take for example low resolution screens. The human eye, when compared to traditional measurements of resolution, can process the equivalent of “324 megapixels” (1) camera. So transitioning from reading magazines, with a relatively high print resolution, to a low resolution screen would be a painful experience for long periods of reading.

On the flip side, the benefits of digital reading are profound. The ability to select a word and obtain it’s definition on the spot without much effort or interruption is a dream to any highschool student — at least that was my biggest complaint back then. How about searching for a specific section of a novel to extract an excerpt? How about simply accessibility — who would want to lug around 4 or 5 books.

Now with technology all caught up — extremely high resolution screens, awesome processing power with advanced CPU’s, and great battery technology and the connectivity of the cloud thrown in to boot — the time has come!

Let me break away for a sec to compare this to CD’s. When compared to music CD’s there was a time where we would pack our CD boxs on our weekend trip — not all, but your favorite set for sure. Today, you surely carry hundreds of albums on your iPhone (yes, I’m biased) as a second thought. Well, books are on their merry way too — and with a vengence IMHO.

Music took a while too take a foothold to digitization primarily becuase the world was simply adjusting to the digitization shock. I recall first hearing about MP3 around the middle of my BS degree around 1995 to 1996 time period — yet the first mover risk syndrome still took a heavyweight like Apple an additional 5 years to release the first iPod.

Now, roughly 14 years after mere MP3 awareness, we have a proliferation of digital music to the point where by the music titans are forced to rethink the concept of the album and the CD album insert, etc. from a digital perspective and make it a reality by collaborating with the new digital music titan — Apple and iTunes (2).

So, I feel we are just at the beginning of a similar digital turning point with books. Amazon, naturally and without much turbulence, took the first step with their Kindle in late 2007 early 2008. Their reader suffered from what I would call the newcomer syndrome. Amazon is not known for building hardware nor software, yet here they are with a device on center stage. With sufficient top down support (Bezos practically reserved Kindle as his next child’s name) adoption is certain. The level of endorsement has parallels with Bill and his digital ink / tablet initiatives.

In short, what struck a chord to write this blog is Sony’s entry into the market. Sony’s is known for building hardware — particular for consumers with their walkman of the 80’s and other eletronic devices having a sliver of software with them as their modern handycams. Sony just yesterday announced a economically priced eReader for just $199. Price attracts and with a brand like Sony, surely it will sell and will be a prominent second footing (3).

My bets however are with my good old trusted expert in hardware/software combos with a keen focus on consumer — yes, Apple. Apple has been on the rummor mill now for years with a tablet — even having a patent exposed for a tablet with touch screen. My guess is they have no choice but to introduce a tablet or some type of reading / entertainment device leveraging their touch experience with the iPhone. Perhaps even by the holiday season if rumors have their way this season unlike previous failed attempts to resurect it. As a shareholder, I would almost be disappointed if they don’t given the feaverish rush in this arena.

While I have enjoyed the recent Hollywood iteration of Marvel comics with movies such as Superman, Spiderman, Hulk, etc., I have never been a reader of comics books themselves.

Reading through my typical news articles I found an intriguing article about Apple banning a comic book based app called Murderdrome. Apple, according to the SDK guidelines, reserves the full right to reject any application which may be offensive to some people. It’s very concerning to me when content beyond the obvious porn and blatant gore is blocked from being available through the App Store.

If an international news application, not bound by domestic censorship rules, posts a graphic image of a war scene in their news application as part of an article — can this now embody Apple to remove the application from the App Store?

Due to lack of access, I have yet to preview the Murderdrome app to determine how graphic the scenes may be, but based on the YouTube video below it’s plan comics and far from any graphic or questionable content.

Presuming Murderdrome simply has a controversial name and their content was actually quite the contrary to from the name’s suggestion, would Apple have accepted the App? And if so, would they take it out afterwards when the content transitioned slowly to the more murderous scenes as the name implies. As you can see, it’s a very blurry line Apple has their work cut out for them if they are going to play the “Content Cop” in their App Store.

The matter of fact is this App is very revolutionary. Just by watching the YouTube video, I learned about the way comic are from pencil, to ink, to color — granted, one could have derived this through simple thought and this should probably indicate how distant I am from comics in general.

Bottom line though, Infurious, the makers of Murderdrome, decided to exploit the iPhone features to expose the entire process to the reader — an innovative feat clearly seen in their YouTube video.

In essence, they capture the three representative images for each scene during the stages of development (the pencil, inking, and final colorized step). As you interact with the comics by flipping through the screens, you can drill down to either of the three images by dragging down or up. So if you like comics with the pencil look, you have it. If you like comics in their full color mode — you have it to. If you are simply the curious observer on how they created a particular screen, stop and flip through the three versions accordingly.

This is simply another demonstration of how digitization enhances the experience of a traditional medium beyond a simple port.

There is great debate still with the delays and times the iPhone takes to backup. I myself had the excruciating waits of 2-3 hours for a simple backup as well as apps crashing.

I am not going to speculate exactly why the delays are, however after extensive research I concluded iPhone 2.0.2 has cleared the backup delays. Since I am not sure if the backup delays are also remedied by the version of iTunes I am using, I would like to emphasize I am using 7.7.0 (shown as 7.7 in the about iTunes) instead of 7.7.1 which is the currently available version.

iTunes 7.7.1, again after extensive research, lead me to conclude it also has problems with the digital rights management applied to the applications. If you download Apps from iPhone, this app may have trouble synching back to your computer. I quote “may” because I have had mixed results. Similarly, your apps may simply start crashing from one day to another without warning. In my case, I was comfortably using my apps and stopped to show the lighter to my brother. The lighter app froze (didn’t crash; just froze after a few frames of the flame video) requiring me to cold boot the iPhone. Upon rebooting, none of my apps would launch — they would immediately quit.

By downgrading to iTunes 7.7.0 as some have indicated, I have resolved all these app problems. I believe Apple is not as quick to update iTunes, even though they are aware of via a blanket email from Steve Jobs on the matter. I feel this is mainly due to the fact they may be hard at work with 7.8 for a September announcement of a new iTunes subscription model (rumors have it at $100/year for full iTunes music access).

Anyhow, just to dispel any concerns I decided to perform a sync which should cause an automatic backup to occur as the conclusion of this post and these are the results. My iPhone is pretty loaded too as you can see from this picture:

[Note: I was wondering why iTunes seems darker here than the previous and this was due to the fact I had iTunes selected as the foreground window for this screen shot and those that follow]

01:30:55 – Photos Synching started
01:31:00 – All SyncComplete

I highly recommend you download the 7.7.0 version of iTunes for PC & Mac from my other postings or other sources on the internet and recommend you do a clean slate starting with a 2.0.2 factory restore using 7.7.0.

After numerous restores, endless backups, and frustrating reconfiguration of my favorite apps I have finally arrived to the root of the problem and the solution. First, just to make clear, I would like to point out the various things I have tried over the past week or so as surely you have tried some if not all yourself. Each of these had varying levels of success but ultimately I encountered errors either when upgrading an app or simply launching it later on.

Restore from previous backup

Restore to original factory software and resync apps

Remove App explicitly via the iPhone and resync

Remove App explicitly via iTunes and re-adding it

and more…

The root of the problem seems to be the way iTunes 7.7.1 applies the digital rights management to the apps. iTunes does this to ensure the app only runs on authorized computers similar to how the music you purchase is also limited to authorized computers. The problem stems from some failure in the way iTunes 7.7.1 applies this signature to the apps. Further complicating matters are apps purchased through the App Store icon on the phone. Theory states these apps will sync up to your computer automatically since they were purchased through the same account. These apps many times didn’t transfer over transparently — identifying again some issue with the digital rights management applied to the application files.

The solution is quite simple! Simply downgrade to iTunes 7.7 and use that version until the next release is issued by Apple (expected in September as per some other blogs). I had a heck of a time finding 7.7 and even initially thought Apple themselves downgraded to 7.7 because their site reflects iTunes 7.7.

After downloading from their site however, it clearly states 7.7.1 in the title bar so another source must be found.

For convenience, I have aggregated these installers from the web and they can be downloaded here:

Mac:

Simply drag the iTunes application into the trash. Don’t worry none of your preferences are erased. Rerun the 7.7 installer and you are done.

The iPhone 2.0.2 update does indeed help matters with the 3G connection. Now I waited almost a week since the update to report on my blog because I wanted to have ample time to test and review the results. As we all know, the update improved responsiveness of the phone in many areas such as the keyboard and contacts. The one item most people have been waiting roe though is the improved 3G connectivity.

My findings indicate the switching to edge randomly has decreased quite a bit. It has not been eliminated only because I noticed it on edge the other day at the AT&T store but this was the only time I noticed. Previous to the update I would notice through my speakers as the speakers would make the infamous GSM noise – indicating it as on the edge network at the time. Since the update the speakers never made noise again!

While at the AT&T store I mentioned the edge connection to a salesman and h pulled his 3G phone ( non iPhone ) and he also had edge at that time too! Great news for me as I felt the iPhone was simply doing what any other 3G phone would do.

I rarely have dropped calls and for some reason when I visited my parents on Saturday I had notorious amounts of dropped calls and no data connection. — at least it wouldn’t bring down the mail or web page when trying to. This brought my spirits down quite a bit as now my phone was acting up like many of the iPhones talked about online. Interestingly enough when I left my parents house everything went back to normal. Keep in mine also I had almost a full 3G signal at my Dad’s house.

Curious if this was an isolated incident I decided to drive by my dad’s neighborhood the following day and attempt making calls and low and behind I was dropping like crazy again.

Initially I believed AT&T was resetting their network or something to that effect the night before. This time however it was too coincidental the calls were dropping again in the same vicinity. My take so far is we have some areas of AT&T network which are not iPhone friendly for some reason and those in that area are mostly being affected.

I just upgraded my iPhone to firmware 2.0.2 and decided to conduct some tests. This website conducts some latency tests and then does a bandwidth test right afterwards. I feel this test is more valid than say the speed test within the app store because there are delays with DNS resolution and transfer start up times which unfortunately are included in the timing. While I agree the speed test app in the app store may represent real world scenarios, it does not measure nor report brute download capacity accurately.

I did find this website with a casual google lookup and I am in awe with the repeated results with a poor 3G signal.

See for yourself:

No matter how many times I try (in this case three) I find it difficult to match the brute timing above with the free speed test app in the app store. See for your self:

UPDATE 8/20:

Just to not create the wrong expectations, the speed I was obtaining was at 2:30am when surely there was very little traffic on the 3G network. All throughout the day I was obtaining values from 400k-800k.

One of the best games for the iPhone is now available — and it’s FREE! I normally do not play games much nor was I ever a crazy tetris fan, but this native application by far exceeds all expectations for an iPhone game.

The game has excellent animation by having the pieces smoothly move down for each descending step.

The most impresive feature though is the touch interface along with the smooth animation. Everyone who I have shown Tris to instantly said “wow” when the first moved a piece with their finger.

A unique feature of the finger interface is the ability to move the piece up again. You might say, “hey wait a minute that’s not allowed in Tetris”. But indeed you can though. At first I thought this was a simple one time helper feature because I was not able to move the pieces up consistently. In the end though it turns out I can move each piece up — but only if I accelerated it by moving it down with my touch first. In other words you can move the piece up only as far as it would normally be if you hadn’t accelerated it down.

I really recommend the game and I easilly give it a full five stars! Search for Tris in the app store to download it.

Are your backups taking too long with your new iPhone? There is great debate online as to why the iPhone takes so long — some claiming its due the apps, while others claiming they won the IBL (iPhone Backup Lottery) if they can sync without performing an automatic backup.

For sure this issue will be resolved by Apple in the next iTunes/iPhone updates however until then we need a solution so here it is:

MAC Users:

First exit iTunes and then open your terminal window and type in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

Sample Terminal Window

This command simply accesses the MAC OS X user default system [defaults] using the [write] command to change an attribute of the [com.apple.iTunes] application setting it’s [DeviceBackupsDisabled] boolean attribute to [true].

Now, simply exit iTunes & restart iTunes. After doing this, the Backup is no longer performed automatically nor is it an option from the iPhone’s device’s context menu. To re-enable backups, just type the same command with false and relaunch iTunes.